The present invention pertains to the technical field of object detection, and in particular to techniques for detecting any moving object in front of a vehicle.
Japanese Kokai Patent Application No. Hei 10[1998]-214326 discloses an automatic guidance system that uses Hough transformation to detect road edges from images in front of a vehicle. A string of detected edges is arranged side-by-side on a straight line and is subjected to Hough transformation to detect the road edges. For the Hough transformation, as the points that form the road edges are detected, curves are drawn in the parameter space, and the accumulated values of the points on the curves have to be added. This processing may be performed for all of the points that form the road edges, in which case the processing load is heavy. It would be desirable to provide an less computationally-intensive technique to detect road edges or other boundary lines in the path of a vehicle.